


dealer's choice

by afearsomecritter (jsaer)



Category: Critical Role (Web Series), UnDeadwood (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, UnDeadwood Mini-series (Critical Role)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-10
Updated: 2019-12-10
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:42:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21738544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jsaer/pseuds/afearsomecritter
Summary: In which Matthew Mason meets the Dealer a few years early.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 74





	dealer's choice

**Author's Note:**

> because reasons

\----

The world is white and grey, sunlight muffled by the cold clouds and drifting snow. 

The world is white and grey and red, in pools and splattered across the clearing.

(pink and red and white and yellow the interior of a body is more colors than you’d think)

Matthew is propped against a tree, panting in the cold silence, breath in white plumes.

He’s adding to the red in the clearing. 

He’s the only one breathing. 

The ground is torn up, and spectral flames are still flickering at the base of a tree. 

The one patch of trees hiding the one goddamn patch of bandits, he thinks muzzily. 

Matthew thinks he’s bleeding out. There’s a lot of red seeping between his fingers where his hand is clasped to his side.

(his name is new, and he’s between fort collins and rapid city, has been for a while. he is eighteen years old and he is dying)

There’s something standing in front of him, as the world tunnels in. He blinks rapidly, sparks and flashes dotting his vision. There’s something standing in front of him, a faceless figure with a card deck.

“Oh,” he mumbles, tongue thick from the blood in his mouth, “ ‘s you. Here t’ collect?”

The Dealer crouches, wordless, in front of him. A larger figure behind it leans forward, and Matthew thinks distantly of leviathans. 

“Well,” the thing behind the Dealer says, “this won’t do at all.”

The Dealer says, “Would you like to make a bet?”

Matthew looks at them both. The Dealer is smiling. 

“Terms?” Matthew asks, red leaking between his teeth. He’s not hurting too much, which he thinks is bad.

“I win, you live, and you belong to me. You win, you die with your soul,” says the leviathan. He thinks if he could see its mouth it’d be smiling too.

He blinks, slow and heavy, “Hell’ve a sales pitch.” 

“I like you,” the both of them say, “We want to keep you.”

(something soft and warm flutters in his chest at that)

“...deal.”

He loses.

\---

He works as a bartender for a while, in a city where hope is a four letter word and spite is a prayer. He meets all kinds of people, the desperate and the resigned, hucksters and healers, cruel and the rare kind. 

Matthew learns a lot of card games, teaches them too. Sees a lot of gambling for gold and things infinitely more precious. He learns what a soul looks like. He gets caught in a bar brawl once, because some idiot couldn't cheat well. He gets a scar across his face for the trouble that takes forever to heal.

(the knife he catches between his ribs barely has time to bleed)

\---

Matthew Mason becomes a priest in Rapid City because the man in the chapel spoke of rebirth, and he has a scar on his side where an eighteen year old deserter bled out and someone else walked away. He becomes a priest in Rapid City because everyone tells everything to priests and bartenders and he's already been the latter.

(he becomes a priest because it’s funny, and a god already speaks to him)

\---

Kindness and gentleness are not things he's familiar with, but-

the priest in the chapel speaks of God's love like it's a weapon, like an inevitability. Like it’s something one already has. And he _means it,_ even to a young man who's still little more than feral eyes and the ability to break up an imminent bar brawl with a look.

Matthew doesn't fucking know what to do with that other than try and mimic it.

A kindly preacher is a good disguise, he tells himself. 

(he's never been very good at lying)

\---

He leaves Rapid City when he finds a telegram asking for a new Reverend for the town of Deadwood. 

Some of the most interesting flotsam rotting from drink in Rapid City's saloons washed in from Deadwood, so he's always been curious.

(the mostly burnt down church is a surprise) 

\---

He’s very good at keeping his head down, practice makes perfect. The people of Deadwood are suspicious, twitchy bastards with spines of steel and depthless greed in their hearts like mineshafts and he kind of loves them.

And then Al fuckin’ Swearengen calls him to his office with four strangers and everything starts to tilt sideways. 

\---

There’s something bright toothed and hungry in Arabella Whitlock. 

There’s something iron steady and aching in Aloysius Fogg.

There’s something hurting and mother bear protective in Miriam Landisman.

There’s something hunted and resigned in Clayton Sharpe.

(there’s something reaching and grasping in all of them, and matthew likes them more than he has anyone in decades, and does his best to be soft and kind for them)

\---

What the fuck kind of snake abominations-

Matthew has seen some shit, hell he _is_ some shit but he does not like these snakes with their creepy tentacles and diving underground bullshit-

He really needs to thank Sharpe for the shotgun.

\---

"Give unto me your souls-"

And Matthew startles because he hadn't realized it was talking to _all of them_ and then he's dreaming like he hasn't in years.

\---

"You already have my soul," he murmurs, eyes down and counting rosary beads like cards, "what am I gambling with, when I draw?" 

_Chance,_ says the thing behind the Dealer.

"What?"

_Fates._

The god looks past him. Looks at familiar bright souls fluttering in nearby rooms and woods and a distant house. Matthew looks with it. 

(fate is a box of rockets and shrapnel, spiraling chaos and bets where things will crash or land. matthew has always been very good at lightning fuses)

"You just want to see what happens,” Matthew says. 

It laughs.

\---

“-there seem to be something different about you, something different than all the rest of us unfortunates.”

Matthew replies with some sort of negative, and stays real fuckin quiet when Arabella visits the other bartender and comes back speaking of missing souls and the fog and somehow no one connects the dots.

-or at least doesn't say anything.

He’s only glad it wasn’t him she went to, he may be as faceless as the Dealer there but his voice stays the same and him going into the same blank eyed stillness at the same time as Arabella would’ve been quite the tip off for the sharp eyes in this crew.

(matthew is not quite a bartender like the other, not quite like the dealer either. he does not exist solely in the other space, in the hunting grounds. he’s still mostly human, he thinks, except in all the ways he’s not. he’s not a carnival barker, calling attention to wares, his god does that itself. he’s there to push and tempt and talk and listen and ask “one more round?”)

\---

"I know what you did," the man says, and Matthew thinks _No, you don't._

A part of him is worried, when he lets part of the kind Reverend peel away, that his new friends may flinch. They don't, and Aly even circles around as backup. 

Matthew's grin widens and for the first time gets to say the numbers were on his side.

\---

Arabella displays an alarming amount of enthusiasm for dissection and the news of a snake god.

Aly and Miriam are fully prepared to shoot a steaming corpse.

Clayton actually takes Matthew's genuinely unintentional dare about checking the exit, stoic faced throughout except for the faint crinkle around his eyes as he meets Matthew’s stare.

Matthew decides he's keeping them.

\---

Ashing Wild Bill Hicock is fun as hell, and the resulting shakiness that’s too much like a certain wintry clearing is worth it. 

(greed ain’t cheap the dealer says like matthew doesn’t know, like he wasn’t created to push and pull and create greed making sinkholes in souls, like he isn’t the many mawed thing he is now under human skin-)

\---

Miriam has nitro. He adores this woman.

(he’s also slightly terrified of her because she was _keeping that in her dress what the fuck_ -)

\---

Reverend Matthew Mason is a lot annoyed and a little outraged ( _"lesser"_ servant, that snakey little fuck) and has always been a whole lot impulsive so pushing Aly to heal himself when there are perfectly good bandages nearby seems like a reasonable thing to do.

Even when he hears the flutter of cards followed by the distant dice clatter of a failure and watches all expression fade from Aly's face he doesn't think much of it past vague disappointment. 

Few of the backfires are permanent, and this one isn't so he sets it aside. 

(he knows this the same way he knows the dealer's faces and what a soul looks like and the feeling of cloth and glass in his hands as he speaks to those asking-)

He continues not to think much of it until they're in an empty saloon and Aly draws his gun on apparently not Clayton Sharpe.

Well, shit.

\---

The Dealer is a puppet the beast behind it uses (a lot like him). So when Matthew steps forward, as guns begin to raise, that is not who he talks to.

(he's known his god for a while now, knows it plays favorites and he's never understood that until now, with two of his new favorites pointing guns at each other while a third pleads for them to stop and the fourth stands shock still)

"I would like to make a bet," he says in the between space. 

The god sends a querying hum, like an avalanche in his head. He rolls the words around his tongue, tasting them like fine whiskey before he speaks.

"The one he called Amos Kinsey will die trying not to kill the man killing him."

_If he does?_

"I want his soul, and his life."

_If he does not?_

He hums. "More interesting bets for you."

A laugh like screaming foxes and burning churches. 

(matthew has never had favorites before but he is one)

_Very well, bet taken_

He wins.

Amos Kinsley bleeds out on the street, and the bartender holds out a hand, palm up. Clayton Sharpe will wake up in a room above a church to a bartender in a clerical collar offering him a whiskey.

\-----

(six days later aloysius fogg wakes up screaming as a week's worth of emotions crash down on him at once. he wakes up to gentle hands helping him sit up and giving him his water canteen and a bafflingly familiar voice saying "sorry about that, forgot how much of a bitch that backlash can be." 

aly stares at the impossible form of the reverend, clutching his canteen in a white knuckled grip. 

"what" and "I'm sorry" tangle in his throat, and the reverend smiles, and says "You'll be fine, better luck next time." and he taps the wanted poster on the ground that had been in aly's saddlebag a moment before- "he's fine too."

then he's gone.

aly doesn't sleep that night, but he does the one after.)

\-----

“Why?”

A soft laugh.

“I like you.”

\-----------------


End file.
